The present invention relates to a method and an apparatus for detecting the orientation of a face from captured images, and relates to a program product including a recording medium having recorded a program for executing the above method.
A method of detecting the orientation of a face from captured images has been known which creates a plurality of inclined face images from a sample image of the full face and searches the most similar region to an image to be detected among the plurality of inclined face images. That is, pattern matching is performed using the plurality of inclined face images, and the inclination of the face in an image having the highest similarity is set to the orientation of the face in the image to be detected. Such a technique is disclosed in Japanese Patent Publication Nos. 2001-291108A and 2004-94491A.
However, in the above publications, a processing for creating the plurality of inclined face images and a processing for calculating the similarity in the plurality of inclined face images need to be performed, which causes the amount of calculation to be increased and a process to be duplicated.